It’s a tragedy when a person has to lose all of their teeth. Sadly, there are many people who eventually have to face that situation. There was a time when all of our efforts were directed toward prevention and keeping teeth. That is is till the philosophy of most of us in dentistry, but due to circumstances many people still lose their teeth.
Economics plays a role these days.
Lucky for most of us we have a great solution: implants.
As they say, “We’ve come a long way baby.”
When implants first came to dentistry we were sort of limited in what we could do, but dentistry has figured out many ways to design implant cases so that today’s solutions are better than ever. In the early days that wasn’t always true.
Take a look at Jim. He had 8 implants placed twelve years ago. On top of the implants, the dentist created a bar that was secured to the implants with eight individual two piece abutments. That bar was screwed into place and a removable denture was placed on the bar...yes! I said removable denture.
Let’s take a time out.
Even twelve years ago the thought of implants meant teeth that stayed in the mouth. That was and is the biggest selling point for implants.
So Jim had a removable denture secured on eight implants, using 27 components.
We’ve come a long way, baby (LOL).
Some years later the denture didn’t feel quite as secure as it did on day one. As a fix the dentist placed those two little anchors that are sticking out of the photo on the bottom.
It never worked.
So Jim came to see us. Our challenge was to give Jim a fixed restoration. We didn’t need all 8 implants, but for the sake of not being wasteful we tried to use all of them. Our goal—to make a fixed denture and reduce the components from 27 to 9.
The photo on the right is the result.
Difficult case? Yes…lots of transfers and putting pieces together. At the end of the day Jim was happy.
In all my years of practice I don’t think I ever had a happier patient. For the first time in twelve years he could eat and not worry about his teeth coming out.
I know that sounds like some BS the denture adhesive ads tell us…but this is real.
After treatment he handed me a gift certificate to a local high-end steakhouse. In retrospect, I should have treated him to the steak.